Tag: OCF Update

Thursday and Friday were critically busy times around the office so I haven’t been able to post much. But after next Wednesday I’ll be vacationing until New Year’s Day. I anticipate a bunch of posts will be published including reviews, political opinion and photographic. So sorry for the drought. Things will be back to normal very soon.

So, the mid-terms are over. Pelosi or some other moonbat will be obstructing the House and raving on the front page of the Times and Post for the next two years. Soon the Democrat candidates for the 2020 race will begin foaming at the mouth. Nothing legislative will happen for the next two years, except approval of presidential appointments in the Senate and the budget farce to produce continuing resolutions from both bodies of the Congress. President Trump has his work cut out and will have to use all his wits and resources to clean up the Justice Department and remove as many illegal aliens from the country as he can.

What should we be doing? It seems to me we need to make some progress on our own. There’s all kinds of talk about building our own platforms and I agree with that idea. But it seems there’s more talk than building going on. Well, in the spirit of being part of the solution I’ve been putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve been investing in advertising on various conservative sites. I’ve used both an advertising company and also contacted directly with a couple of sites that place the ads directly. And I will say that although the company that can put your ads on big sites like Drudge gets lots of traffic the direct advertising gets plenty of traffic too and is a good value on a per click basis. I plan to continue investing in advertising and also attempt to broaden my content by partnering with other writers who have similar points of view to my own. As an experiment I requested some content from one of our viewers last week and thought the results were excellent. I think providing a broader range of content, including non-political subjects is a necessity if I intend to grow the site. I also intend to start running contests to encourage more comments and participation. As an example I am accumulating all these paperback books from the sf&f reviews I’ve been doing. I could bundle some of these and make them a prize for some contest. And similarly, for a photographic contest I can make some camera equipment a prize.

Basically I’d like to expand the site to build up a community of people mostly on the right who enjoy the experience of communing with like-minded individuals on subjects that they enjoy. Not to be grandiose, but it can be a social media locale on a much smaller scale than a Facebook but with a lot more satisfaction in the interactions. And I don’t minimize the probability that I’ll run into the usual problems with trolls and cyber-attacks that go along with anything on our side of the political divide. But I think it’s important to actually make the effort to get going on it. Talk is cheap. Organizing is a lot of talk but it’s also time and money and I’m encouraged already that with a little bit of both I’m already seeing some results.

Thanksgiving. Short work week and then the Thursday and Friday family gatherings. I expect posts may be a little sparse those two days. But most folks will be equally busy with their own doings. As a consolation I’m off most of next week and will use up all of that turkey and pumpkin pie typing away feverishly at OCF content.

Here’s to hoping 2019 will be the year when the right starts doing its own thing and stops waiting for the government to do it for us. Here’s hoping that the New Year will start to look like a new world. But it will only happen if we ourselves individually make it happen in large and small ways.

I thought this might be fun so me and a few friends will be using the comments section to discuss the results on election night (Tuesday November 6th). Just for kicks I attached a poll to this post to see if there are any other interested parties.

Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays as a kid and in my heart of hearts I haven’t really progressed far from that. I guess I’m not a progressive. So here is the advantage to being in business for more than a year. The calendar allows you to recycle stuff you did last year. I did movie reviews of the Universal Classic Monster Movies and a few other related films last year and I’ll recycle them around for the Halloween season. And I’ll add some additional films to avoid the label of laziness. I’ll also try to find some other Halloween content. I guess Ray Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” is sort of the quintessential American story for this time of year. But there are all kinds of other stuff out there from Poe to (yikes) Lovecraft to even that lefty doofus Stephen King. So stay tuned and I’ll start cycling those in.

Looking ahead, I will be reviewing a few science fiction and fantasy books. I’m currently reading the pre-release copy of Hans G. Schantz’s third volume in his “Hidden Truth” series. It’s called “The Brave and the Bold.” It’s a combination of a techno-thriller and a parallel history story. I’m only about halfway through but there are all kinds of nice touches. And the technical stuff is 100% legit. And there are a couple of other books in the hopper. Larry Correia edited a collection of short stories by famous (and not so famous) fantasy writers writing in his Monster Hunter universe called “The Monster Hunter Files.” Then there’s the next volume in the Galaxy’s Edge series called “Message for the Dead.” So, it’s a busy reading month ahead. I have some movie reviews coming up and I want to go through some of my older photo collections for fresh content for the photo of the day. And I’ve got to keep up with my Trump vs … series. President Trump is sure to get involved in political mayhem sometime soon and he’s sure to bring along his long-suffering buddy Mike Pence and fixer Mad Dog Mattis for clean up. And of course the daily drum beat of SCOTUS confirmation lunacy and mid-term skullduggery along with the baleful shadow of Mueller will provide me with plenty of fresh fodder for my political blather.

So, for the regular readers I’ll explain why some of the features like the photos and the quotes were a little bit different this week. I’m running some intensive advertising this week and last, so I wanted to provide enough content for the new readers to get the idea, right away, what I do here.

For the new readers from Drudge, News Busters, CNS News, Rasmussen, The Political Insider, MRC TV, TMN Today, Trend Chase, Wayne Dupree and anyone else I missed, welcome. I run a site that features my take on social and political happenings from a right-wing perspective (my location on the political spectrum is probably best described here). I also write on photography and science fiction and do reviews of various books, country music, movies and anything else that interests me. And I put up my humble work as an amateur photographer. I encourage comments and also provide forums for those who wan to discuss any of the relevant topics. I allow folks to speak their opinions as long as it’s kept reasonable. I have readers from pretty far across the political spectrum and don’t have a problem with that. In fact, I think that can be a plus as long as the discussion can be kept reasonably respectful.

Anyway, welcome and I hope you can find something interesting to read and maybe discuss.

photog

post script – Oh, I forgot, I also do outlandish Trump humor where I fondly portray him as a cartoonish version of himself. Very juvenile of me but I must have my fun.

Today and tomorrow I’ll be attending an out of town occasion. Posting will be limited. Looking ahead I’m reading Salena Zito’s “The Great Revolt, Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” and I’m working on some other reviews, including some sci-fi and movie stuff. And of course, we must see how Trump will reshape America’s love life in part three of my little comic sketch. Stay tuned.

So, last night I decided to post a story fragment I’ve been futzing around with for some time. It was late and I didn’t check after the fact that the spacing maintained after copying it onto the website. This afternoon when I had a chance to look at it, I saw it was a mess so I straightened it out. My apologies to anyone who opened it up. The draft is still pretty rough and I figure it’s only about 10% of the story but I really kinda like this one and I figured it was reasonable to let people see what I like to write.

My idea is to keep adding sections to it until it’s finished. And then garner opinions on its quality. I harbor secret yearnings to write deathless prose or possibly very long-lived prose. But there it is. My secret vice.

Old people and literary types will have heard of Thomas Mann. He was a German author born in 1875. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in the 1920s and he belonged to the Modernist school. Back in the 1970s if you had a high school English teacher who was especially perverse he would assign a book of Mann’s called “Death in Venice and Other Stories.” Now the title story “Death in Venice,” is vile. It’s the story of an old German writer who has a premonition of death and goes to Venice to feel young again. He has an infatuation verging on pedophilia for an adolescent boy that mercifully goes unfulfilled and then to the reader’s great relief the protagonist dies. The only legitimate reason to read this story is for law enforcement profilers to gain a better understanding of pedophile motivation.

One of the other stories in the book is called “A Man and His Dog.” It is autobiographical and describes Mann’s life in a suburban/rural area of Germany. He chronicles the walks he takes with his approximately German Shorthaired Pointer dog Bashan. We hear about the landscape, the flora and fauna and the farmland occupants of his little world. It is without a doubt, the best thing in the story collection and I’ve always envied his opportunity to share a slice of his world and life in such a congenial narrative. It really is a pleasure to read.

So, even though I keep German Short Haired Pointers, I can’t do what Mann did. I don’t have his facility for felicitous phrasing. But I’m a lot funnier than he was. So, from time to time, I’ll address things in a post that have very little to do with politics, photography or science fiction. When that happens, I’ll assign them to the category “photog’s Corner” and that will be a warning sign of irrelevance to the primary foci of this blog. Caveat emptor.

It’s officially the summer doldrums both on the web and in the real world. I remember an old science fiction short story called the “Silly Season” that had as a premise that during the summer doldrums newspapers were so starved for real news that they would publish any kind of nonsense just to fill space. Apparently the Martians knew about this too so they flooded the news with UFO sightings throughout the silly season for several years running. This had the effect that the papers and their readers became so completely fed up with reading these accounts that when the real invasion began everyone ignored the initial news stories for so long that the humans were conquered before they could react.

That is how I’m beginning to feel about Flynn and Cohen and Manafort and Mueller and Hayden and Brennan and Clapper and Rice and McCabe and Comey and Page and Stryzk and Rosenstein and, and, and!!!

I am completely and utterly fed up with hearing about these idiots. I just can’t decide who is playing whom. Is President Trump about to be dragged off in irons or is Comey and the whole lot of them headed for Guantanamo Bay? Either way I just can’t care anymore about any of this stuff. In fact, I can’t even care enough to make a Trump vs. —– parody about it. The only thing I can think of is to have a parody where he is bored to tears about it. That seems reasonable.

So anyway, sorry for the lack of output. But let’s face it, the silly season is in full swing. If only there were some way to get the Kanamits to load all of the Deep State swamp creatures into the saucer and send them off to that big smorgasbord in the sky. That at least would be worthy of a parody.